Christian Jost (*1963)
Phoenix resurrexit
Odyssey in four parts
for soprano, speaker, choir and orchestra
Staatskapelle Weimar
Jac van Steen conductor
Opernchor des Deutschen
Nationaltheaters Weimar
Wendy Waller soprano
Daniel Morgenroth speaker
Phoenix Resurrexit is for me in many respects
a special work. Not only because
the composition of the piece extended over
some four years, but also because Phoenix
resurrexit developed during its creation
into a never-ending exposition of the whole
palette of highs and lows of the creative
process.
Thus the title became a compositional
programme of recurring destruction, creation
and renewal, with only a single constant:
nothing could keep me from writing
Phoenix. Over the course of four years, the
piece moved off into the far distance as the
Constellation of Pegasus, only then to
become accessible again, near the moon,
and in the end to emerge as the fulfilment
of a childhood dream.
This dream began in 1969: at seven years
old, together with my mother, I experienced
from our homely living room the landing on
the moon. By the time the „Apollo 11“ capsule
splashed down in the Pacific Ocean,
my decision had become firm: I wanted to
become an astronaut. However, the family
holidays in the Alps that took place at this
time and the eight to ten hour car journeys
connected with them forced me to rethink
radically. For what future astronaut could
permit himself constant vomiting in a VW
estate car? Thus I became a composer.
It is the blessing and the curse of compositional
work to make the unknown and
the idiosyncratic fascinatingly accessible
to experience. Thereby one dives into
much alien – not always weightless –
space, which can, however, have on a few
listeners an effect as hostile to humans as
that of the outer space of the astronauts.
To elicit from music sounds that contain
within them an odyssey whose thrilling
story is painted by the composer is the task
and the ambition of my whole compositional
work. Of all my creative work up to the
present time, Phoenix resurrexit demanded
the most intensive engagement.
When I first had the idea of composing a
larger work that would cast creation into a
new light, from the point of view of an
astronaut and with the knowledge of space
travel, Oliver Buslau and I sought out
appropriate texts. The wheat was separated
over and over again from the chaff
through my deeper penetration into the
subject, and Phoenix resurrexit has become
a concentration distilled down to the bare
essentials.
Thus the soprano has unambiguously
taken on the role of the phoenix, that mythical
bird of perpetual renewal. Its ever recurring
words appear during the treatment at the
most varied places. It thus becomes a metaphorical
symbol embodying simultaneously:
mythic exoticism and love, the beginning of
the discovery of the eternal and the immanent
certainty of the Apocalypse.
Following the primal concept of the
creation, this permanently occurring condition
of the simultaneous creation and
destruction of life, I have created a corresponding treatment which I have described
as an Odyssey in Four Parts. The task of the
speaker is to bear this four-part Odyssey as
his own and to make it manifest, as if to tell
the tale of a journey through the „self“.
The four parts are:
Dawn – Creation
Phoenix
Apocalypse
Love – Eternity
With all the complexity of the subject and
the musical structures used, the unifying
concept, the overall dramaturgy, is a kind
of symphonic super-form consisting of an
exposition, an Adagio, a Scherzo, and an
apotheistic Finale. The various musical
components, from which the whole network
is woven, sound forth in ever varying
dramaturgical moments; they are positioned
in ever changing relationships, light up
the same thought in a different context, and
give contrasting meanings to that which is
said and to that which sounds.
In connection with Phoenix resurrexit,
two other works were written whose musical
material influenced Phoenix and developed
it further, following their own dynamic:
Rhapsody II – Song of the Phoenix, for Violin
and Piano
Sinfonia – Dream of the Phoenix, for Orchestra.
The unifying element of the three works is
not only various sounds and notes but the
fascination with creation and its simultaneous
destruction and renewal.
Christian Jost, August 2001